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United Linux Beta 3 - Installation and Overview
By: bilbrey on 2002-11-17 19:09:40
Section 1 - Installation

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A note about the testing: Like SuSE, one of its progenitors, United Linux Beta 3 (hereafter ULB3) installs nicely as a VMware guest operating system, unlike the recent releases from Mandrake and Red Hat. This isn't necessarily a knock on those two, it's just easier for me to do installation reviews with screenshots by using VMware (http://www.vmware.com/).

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The installation starts with a familiar old friend, the text-mode boot screen. This is useful for circumstances where UL is being installed on hardware with minimal video capabilities. On real hardware with a modern video card, the installer drops right into an attrative framebuffer mode, offering all the options shown in that text screen above left, and more. More display resolutions for one thing, and that's good, given that 640x480 on a 19" tube is faintly ridiculous. Here in VMware, accepting the default 640x480 mode allows the install to progress into a XFree and QT-based installer that looks ... just like YAST2. Of course, it is. Once past the Beta Warning Dialog, we're faced with the usual suspect: the language selection step. For obvious reasons, it is most often found first in any Linux installation. I'm a little surprised that it didn't precede the warning.

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Now that it knows how to address you, the installer really starts cranking. It takes a deep hard look at your current system configuration (seen in the left shot above). Then it's time for the second question of the install: New, Update, Boot or Abort. New installation is by far the most likely culprit, since it's hard to update a previously existing installation from a distribution that's brand new, right? "Boot installed system" is a rescue function, often handy to have around after you've reinstalled Windows in the first partition, and made your linux system inaccessible as a result. Abort isn't bloody likely after coming this short distance. We haven't learned anything yet!

By the time we've reached just the sixth screenshot in this review (above right), United Linux is ready to roll with its installation. That is, if you want to accept all the defaults it has selected for you, then there's literally no more steps until after the OS is installed. In that it strongly resembles Windows installs, which ask just a couple of questions up front, then complete the configuration with user data and more as the final steps. However, if I just take all the default selections, then this review would be too short and boring, so let's have a look at a few particulars.

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Changing the configuration for any of the several different sections can be initiated by either selecting the title in the dialog window, or by selecting off the "pull-up" menu from the Change button. These items include Mode, Keyboard, Mouse, Partitioning, Software, Booting, Timezone and Language. I'd leave it alone, except that there are things I want so show you, and it'd make the review too short, if I did... <grin>.

The middle screenshot above is the initial partition editing dialog. That leads to a second tier, at right, where you can choose which drive to edit. A nice touch is that you can then select to work with a single drive, or head into full-bore "expert" editing, as we're about ot do. Not much difference between the two if you only have the one drive, of course.

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The Expert Partitioner screen looks an awful lot like just about every GUI partitioning tool these days. Lizard, Disk Druid, Yast. Everything's become a blur... oh wait, that's just my vision. Heh. Once in the editor, you can either modify the default setup that United Linux selected, or wipe it clean and do your own. I often do that, but their selections are sane enough that a Linux newbie can feel good about letting it go through. After selecting a specific partition to edit, a dialog like that shown in the middle snap above is revealed. Among several options, several filesystems are on offer: Ext2, Ext3, FAT, JFS, ReiserFS and XFS (as well as swap, of course). It's interesting that at about the same time as Mandrake transitioned from Reiser to Ext3, United Linux drops a white ball in the Reiser voting bag, and recently ReiserFS also (finally) got a vote of confidence from Gentoo. And although I'm not going to go through the motions at this time, United Linux has LVM and RAID options in the expert partitioning section of the installer, just as Red Hat 8.0 does. I've used the latter and been impressed. I'll give United Linux an assumed competent in that area as well.

Moving quickly on, I've saved my partitioning changes, and gone on to the package manager. Software group selections include Gnome, KDE, a webserver, an "LSB Runtime Environment" (whatever that is), a Graphical Base System (ditto), Analyzing tools, Authentication, DHCP and DNS servers, File and Print Servers, and Mail and News Services. It sure sounds like a ServerStation setup. I wouldn't encumber a server with whole lots of GUI, nor would I burden a workstation user with all those services. Let's look at the Detailed Selection screen, shown above right. In the left window, you can select which major grouping, then add or delete individual packages (and their dependencies) in the right side. Warning: If you don't know what you're doing, then DON'T subtract packages. You might remove something the system or you really need/want. Adding is considerably safer.

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As a final step, I'll check to ensure that the timezone and system clock selections are correct. Each distribution generally chooses a different default timezone. Redhat uses EST5EDT, but then, they're a North Carolina company. Given its global nature, with parents in Europe, Asia, North and South America, it appears that East Coast time is the compromise made for United Linux. One thing to note. Linux likes running with a clock in UTC, as then the complications of daylight savings time are taken care of automatically by the operating system. But if you're dual booting with Windows, leave the hardware (BIOS) clock set to localtime, and don't use UTC in Linux. You'll be much happier, really.

With all of our choices made, it is decision time: Go or No Go. Well, GO, of course, but then that's my job isn't it. Drive the car towards the cliff, and let you see if it's safe enough to ride in yourself. The large green box, even with its non-warning color, is clear enough as a rotation point in the takeoff of this Linux installation. The next steps that follow are automated, starting with formatting the partitions selected previously. Your role (and mine) at this point is reduced to watching the clothes go around and 'round.

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As the galaxy spins around its central black hole, the installation progresses on through software installation from the first CDROM. I don't mean to imply by that reference that it's slow, it isn't. The process takes about 8 to 12 minutes on a reasonably fast machine. Much of the installation speed is dependent upon CD reader speed (for getting the package) and processor speed (for unpacking from its compressed format). In the tradition of that other YAST-based installation from SuSE, this install takes a short hiatus after the bits from the first CD are in place. A reboot is next up, followed immediately by continued package loading from the second CD, which is prompted for quite politely, too, might I add.

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After the software is all loaded, the final steps are in front of us. I'll note in passing that this style of installation is most similar to that of certain products from the Northwest bits of the United States. That's in stark contrast to many other Linux installers, where all the blanks are filled in before the first iota gets written to disk. Some of the closing steps are pictured above: Setting the root user's password, creating a normal user account, and accepting the default configuration for a graphical desktop are all easily accomplished. One interesting feature of this phase (not shown) is that the passwords can be encrypted with DES, MD5 or Blowfish. To think that some distributions still offer crypt!

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Next, YAST2 trundles along for a few minutes (few being defined as something between 2 and 5 depending on the system) as it creates and writes all the initial system configuration files. Then we can configure specific devices that might be attached to the system, from printers to a variety of network interfaces. This section of configuration starts with a prompt to auto-detect printers. Since I don't have a local printer attached, I declined this step. You can safely run it with many HP and Epson printers. Some beasties (like low end Canons) may not detect or operate as well under Linux. YMMV.

Once past printer auto-detection, you can select from among the interface choices to configure one or another. You can see that the installer picked up the "virtual" Ethernet device that VMware presents to the Guest OS just fine, and has chosen to set it up using DHCP (auto IP configuration). While that is just fine, it's not how I configure my systems.

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In the screenshots above, I custom-configured my network interface to the settings that I wanted. First, I assigned my stock VMware IP guest OS address to the "box", and a stock Class C netmask. Then I setup the host name, domain, name servers and search domains. Finally, I setup the gateway address (wherefrom all good things flow).

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In the leftmost screenshot above, you can see YAST2 wrapping up its final configuration step, writing the network configuration to disk and activating it. And we're done. Since I selected GUI login (didn't I select that?), we see a fairly stock KDM style login screen. There are five choices in Session Type dropdown: kde, gnome, windowmaker, twm and failsafe. Oddly, selecting Windowmaker also runs KDE. So far this is really the first indication I've had that this is a Beta, rather than release software. Selecting KDE and logging in drops me into a fairly drab and corporate looking KDE 3.x session. Installation is done!

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